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The degeneration of American democracy seems an obvious conclusion to the basic premise set out there. Both parties in America are bad, they know they cannot be

The degeneration of American democracy seems an obvious conclusion to the basic premise set out there. Both parties in America are bad, they know they cannot be replaced because of the two party system, and therefore when they lose power, they can be assured they will gain it back again in a few years once people become dissatisfied with the alternative. There is no incentive for parties to better themselves because being bad at their job nets them valuable and necessary private donations from lobbyists with an interest in disabling the proper function of government.

mettamage 1y ago
How come it's just a 2 party system and not a multi party system like in some European countries?
- bazoom42 1y ago
  First-past-the-post tend to lead to two-party systems while proportional representation tend to lead to multi-party systems. But you can’t have proportional representation in presidental elections since only one candidate can win. Countries with multi-party systems tend to have parlimentary systems.
  - Propelloni 1y ago
    And yet the French somehow manage to have a multi-party system while citizens directly vote for the president. And they also have a parliament, as does the USA.
    - crucialfelix 1y ago
      Because they can have two rounds of voting: the first time you vote for who you really want, the second time you choose the lesser evil
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      > And they also have a parliament, as does the USA. A "parliamentary system" is not about just having a parliament (an elected legislature), it is a name for a system where the elected parliament is the paramount power in government, including choosing the head of government. The French have something close to that, the US does not. The French have a semi-presidential system where, as in a parliamentary system, the head of government is the PM elected by the parliament and formally appointed by the President who is the head of state, the US has a (very strong) Presidential system, where the President is head of government (as well as having a Presidential election system that, even ignoring the role of the President, inherently favors duopoly more than the two-round French system.)
  - kubb 1y ago
    The executive body in Switzerland has members from 5 different parties, but it's elected by the federal assembly, not directly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Council_(Switzerland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Council_(Switzerland)
    - mamonster 1y ago
      Its not really an "election" since they have to stick to the Zauberformel and reproduce the results of the parliament. The only elective part is which "faction" of the party the person will be coming from, i.e "Zürich"/"Bern for UDC/SVP.
- kybernetikos 1y ago
  Most countries with multi party systems use different methods for selecting their representatives. When you do a straight aggregation of geographical areas in which you take whomever gets the most votes in each area (sometimes called first past the post) it becomes possible for the most disliked party in a country to win, widely geographical distributed concerns (like ecological concerns) become underrepresented, and most relevant to this conversation, having multiple parties that are close to each other is a huge disadvantage compared to having a single party attracting more people. Because of this, countries with this system will usually see smaller parties merge and stabilise on a 2 party government / opposition set up. The study of how different kinds of voting systems work and their advantages, disadvantages and consequences is called social choice theory. There's an interesting theorem called Arrow's theorem that proves that given a certain set of assumptions, there can be no voting system that works exactly as we would like. Sometimes this is used to argue that all systems are equally bad, but I think this is not true at all - even while imperfect, some systems are much better than others.
  - mettamage 1y ago
    You remind me of Veritasium's video [1]. I should rewatch it and pay actual attention. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk
- mettamage 1y ago
  That question got a downvote? I wonder why. It's a genuine question. Why can't good faith be assumed? Edit: I get that people downvote this comment since it's always controversial to ask. I personally always ask when I am more curious about the answer and am willing to burn any potential karma over it. Asking for feedback is more important. I'm just genuinely surprised about the other one.
  - meristohm 1y ago
    I appreciated your question. I don't really know the answer, and I grew up in the USA. Maybe someone took it as a rhetorical question?
    - fuzzfactor 1y ago
      The early USA gave rise to a party known as the Democratic-Republicans which had the critical mass of officials and candidates to rival the Federalists and eventually dominate them so badly that by 1824 no opposing party even had a candidate for President. There were actually 4 candidates on the ballot though, but they were all from the same Democratic-Republican party. In that case none had enough electoral votes, so Jackson won that one when it was decided by the House. He had a total nationwide popular vote of 151,271, so you have to figure that each vote had so much of a stronger voice back then under a system quite similar to today. Unless you were there I don't think the difference in scale would be easy to fully comprehend. The party was supposedly doing well in lesser races across the growing US too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Democratic-Republican_Party_presidential_tickets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Democratic-Republican_... Then apparently the party just kind of split up and re-organized into the "two-party" system that has continued to dominate ever since. There was no threat until decades later when the Free Silver parties arose based strongly on reversing the trend where increasing economic opportunity was being systematically pushed further beyond reach of average citizens, in the face of bonanza precious metal discoveries that would have been able to pull the whole population ahead of Europe decades sooner if the Free Silvers would have had their way. Bipartisan effort was resurrected as if from a single party again, and the third party was crushed by a well-maintained machine which was bigger than either one of the major parties on their own. Before the citizens could be allowed to get a little taste, the Silvers were assimilated by the Democrats in a platform expansion that was over-dramatized but badly diluted their objectives. It does seem to be the first real big platform deviation between the Democrats & Republicans to start off the 20th century with, but the Silver supporters continued to be systematically disadvantaged for decades to come. No third party movement has presented that level of threat to include such economic clout, but if so, deeply rooted underhanded countermeasures would be deployed, it would apparently take more than anyone could imagine, so no third party for you.
- ronnieboy493 1y ago
  Not a direct cause but popped into my head: Previous to 1988 the League of Women Voters[0] handled presidential debates. A fully independent outside organization. Since then, the Commission on Presidential Debates[1] set rules for admittance to president debates. The CPD was founded jointly by Republicans and Democrats and is controlled solely by both parties. At best, there _appears_ to be a large, gaping conflict of interest when it comes to admitting candidates to presidential debates. In 1992 Ross Perot was invited to the debates as a third option. In 1996 Clinton and Dole successfully argued for Perot to be excluded from the debates as he had no "realistic chance to win" [2]. Perot aside, what happened was downright anti-democratic and further enforced the two party system. Now that I'm on this...I'll do another example of this abuse of power. Candidates from third parties have been arrested for protesting outside presidential debates [3,4]. Even if the protests broke the law, arresting opponents for asking to be given a podium to speak at feels bad. --- [0] https://www.lwv.org https://www.lwv.org [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Debates# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Deb... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/09/18/perot-is-rejected-by-debates-panel/73752026-ca60-4e61-90e2-453e6adf038d/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/09/18/p... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/jill-stein-arrest-green-party-presidential-debate https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/jill-s... [4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3740146.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3740146.stm
  - notahacker 1y ago
    Beyond that, a quirk of the American system in many states is registering your party affiliation at the time you register votes so that you can participate in primaries. When you've got >45% of registered voters identifying as being a supporter of one of the major two parties closely enough to add it to their name on the electoral roll, it's not exactly an encouraging environment to break that status quo Other majoritarian democratic systems often also converge into two party (or two and a bit party, or two parties per region systems) but few seem to normalise voting for the same party every time in quite the same way.
    - ronnieboy493 1y ago
- isaacremuant 1y ago
  The European systems, I'd argue are absolutely worse than many of the "direct republic" systems in the US and other American countries because in the European systems there's a pretense of "consensus" reaching and it mostly ends up preserving an elite status quo and hiding any problems. That's why there's such a big tendency of nanny stating and censorship. It's entrenched in a bureocratic way. The direct vote gets a better chance at subverting the system radically and that's a good thing. Regardless of criticism from the losers about "populism". The end result is great for democracy and actual change.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  Because the legislature uses single member districts with essentially either majority, plurality, or some form of two-round runoff elections, and the executive uses indirect elections where the electors are (for the largest part) elected as statewide at-large slates by winner-take-all plurality. This makes, outside of very unusual circumstances, voting for other than one of the two leading parties ineffective in the normal case, and where it has any effect most likely it will shift the result from the least-unacceptable of the major parties to the most. Many European countries use varieties of proportional representation (most commonly either party list proportional or mixed member proportional), and have a parliamentary system (so that there is not a separately-elected executive administration -- there may be an elected President but they tend to be a head of state and not head of government -- whereas in the US the executive election is even more heavily tilted to support two-party dominance than the legislative system, though the legislative election system is still the more important piece of the problem.)
- existencebox 1y ago
  While I normally keep the political threads at arms length, this is an interesting enough game/voting-theory question that I'm honestly surprised no one has linked the fact that this is a well-studied effect, to the point that it has a specific name: Duverger's Law. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
dragonwriter 1y ago
> Both parties in America are bad, they know they cannot be replaced because of the two party system Yes, the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists know that they cannot be replaced because of the two party system. (Likewise, neither faces the threat of, if it fails to be replaced, being completely re-oriented in a political realignment.) It's not as if, currently, scholars disagree about whether the US is in its Sixth or Seventh Party system -- the two major parties are dominant, stable, and forever unchanging.
- James_K 1y ago
  Do you think "political parties in America never change" is a steel man interpretation of my comment? I would suggest there is material difference between my statement "the parties have little electoral incentive to change" and your interpretation "they do not change". In my view, the latter is hyperbolic but reasonable, and the former is outright true. The parties would clearly not act as they do if people had other options to vote for.

mettamage 1y ago

How come it's just a 2 party system and not a multi party system like in some European countries?

bazoom42 1y ago
First-past-the-post tend to lead to two-party systems while proportional representation tend to lead to multi-party systems. But you can’t have proportional representation in presidental elections since only one candidate can win. Countries with multi-party systems tend to have parlimentary systems.
- Propelloni 1y ago
  And yet the French somehow manage to have a multi-party system while citizens directly vote for the president. And they also have a parliament, as does the USA.
  - crucialfelix 1y ago
    Because they can have two rounds of voting: the first time you vote for who you really want, the second time you choose the lesser evil
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > And they also have a parliament, as does the USA. A "parliamentary system" is not about just having a parliament (an elected legislature), it is a name for a system where the elected parliament is the paramount power in government, including choosing the head of government. The French have something close to that, the US does not. The French have a semi-presidential system where, as in a parliamentary system, the head of government is the PM elected by the parliament and formally appointed by the President who is the head of state, the US has a (very strong) Presidential system, where the President is head of government (as well as having a Presidential election system that, even ignoring the role of the President, inherently favors duopoly more than the two-round French system.)
- kubb 1y ago
  The executive body in Switzerland has members from 5 different parties, but it's elected by the federal assembly, not directly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Council_(Switzerland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Council_(Switzerland)
  - mamonster 1y ago
    Its not really an "election" since they have to stick to the Zauberformel and reproduce the results of the parliament. The only elective part is which "faction" of the party the person will be coming from, i.e "Zürich"/"Bern for UDC/SVP.
kybernetikos 1y ago
Most countries with multi party systems use different methods for selecting their representatives. When you do a straight aggregation of geographical areas in which you take whomever gets the most votes in each area (sometimes called first past the post) it becomes possible for the most disliked party in a country to win, widely geographical distributed concerns (like ecological concerns) become underrepresented, and most relevant to this conversation, having multiple parties that are close to each other is a huge disadvantage compared to having a single party attracting more people. Because of this, countries with this system will usually see smaller parties merge and stabilise on a 2 party government / opposition set up. The study of how different kinds of voting systems work and their advantages, disadvantages and consequences is called social choice theory. There's an interesting theorem called Arrow's theorem that proves that given a certain set of assumptions, there can be no voting system that works exactly as we would like. Sometimes this is used to argue that all systems are equally bad, but I think this is not true at all - even while imperfect, some systems are much better than others.
- mettamage 1y ago
  You remind me of Veritasium's video [1]. I should rewatch it and pay actual attention. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk
mettamage 1y ago
That question got a downvote? I wonder why. It's a genuine question. Why can't good faith be assumed? Edit: I get that people downvote this comment since it's always controversial to ask. I personally always ask when I am more curious about the answer and am willing to burn any potential karma over it. Asking for feedback is more important. I'm just genuinely surprised about the other one.
- meristohm 1y ago
  I appreciated your question. I don't really know the answer, and I grew up in the USA. Maybe someone took it as a rhetorical question?
  - fuzzfactor 1y ago
    The early USA gave rise to a party known as the Democratic-Republicans which had the critical mass of officials and candidates to rival the Federalists and eventually dominate them so badly that by 1824 no opposing party even had a candidate for President. There were actually 4 candidates on the ballot though, but they were all from the same Democratic-Republican party. In that case none had enough electoral votes, so Jackson won that one when it was decided by the House. He had a total nationwide popular vote of 151,271, so you have to figure that each vote had so much of a stronger voice back then under a system quite similar to today. Unless you were there I don't think the difference in scale would be easy to fully comprehend. The party was supposedly doing well in lesser races across the growing US too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Democratic-Republican_Party_presidential_tickets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Democratic-Republican_... Then apparently the party just kind of split up and re-organized into the "two-party" system that has continued to dominate ever since. There was no threat until decades later when the Free Silver parties arose based strongly on reversing the trend where increasing economic opportunity was being systematically pushed further beyond reach of average citizens, in the face of bonanza precious metal discoveries that would have been able to pull the whole population ahead of Europe decades sooner if the Free Silvers would have had their way. Bipartisan effort was resurrected as if from a single party again, and the third party was crushed by a well-maintained machine which was bigger than either one of the major parties on their own. Before the citizens could be allowed to get a little taste, the Silvers were assimilated by the Democrats in a platform expansion that was over-dramatized but badly diluted their objectives. It does seem to be the first real big platform deviation between the Democrats & Republicans to start off the 20th century with, but the Silver supporters continued to be systematically disadvantaged for decades to come. No third party movement has presented that level of threat to include such economic clout, but if so, deeply rooted underhanded countermeasures would be deployed, it would apparently take more than anyone could imagine, so no third party for you.
ronnieboy493 1y ago
Not a direct cause but popped into my head: Previous to 1988 the League of Women Voters[0] handled presidential debates. A fully independent outside organization. Since then, the Commission on Presidential Debates[1] set rules for admittance to president debates. The CPD was founded jointly by Republicans and Democrats and is controlled solely by both parties. At best, there _appears_ to be a large, gaping conflict of interest when it comes to admitting candidates to presidential debates. In 1992 Ross Perot was invited to the debates as a third option. In 1996 Clinton and Dole successfully argued for Perot to be excluded from the debates as he had no "realistic chance to win" [2]. Perot aside, what happened was downright anti-democratic and further enforced the two party system. Now that I'm on this...I'll do another example of this abuse of power. Candidates from third parties have been arrested for protesting outside presidential debates [3,4]. Even if the protests broke the law, arresting opponents for asking to be given a podium to speak at feels bad. --- [0] https://www.lwv.org https://www.lwv.org [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Debates# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Deb... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/09/18/perot-is-rejected-by-debates-panel/73752026-ca60-4e61-90e2-453e6adf038d/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/09/18/p... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/jill-stein-arrest-green-party-presidential-debate https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/jill-s... [4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3740146.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3740146.stm
- notahacker 1y ago
  Beyond that, a quirk of the American system in many states is registering your party affiliation at the time you register votes so that you can participate in primaries. When you've got >45% of registered voters identifying as being a supporter of one of the major two parties closely enough to add it to their name on the electoral roll, it's not exactly an encouraging environment to break that status quo Other majoritarian democratic systems often also converge into two party (or two and a bit party, or two parties per region systems) but few seem to normalise voting for the same party every time in quite the same way.
  - ronnieboy493 1y ago
isaacremuant 1y ago
The European systems, I'd argue are absolutely worse than many of the "direct republic" systems in the US and other American countries because in the European systems there's a pretense of "consensus" reaching and it mostly ends up preserving an elite status quo and hiding any problems. That's why there's such a big tendency of nanny stating and censorship. It's entrenched in a bureocratic way. The direct vote gets a better chance at subverting the system radically and that's a good thing. Regardless of criticism from the losers about "populism". The end result is great for democracy and actual change.
dragonwriter 1y ago
Because the legislature uses single member districts with essentially either majority, plurality, or some form of two-round runoff elections, and the executive uses indirect elections where the electors are (for the largest part) elected as statewide at-large slates by winner-take-all plurality. This makes, outside of very unusual circumstances, voting for other than one of the two leading parties ineffective in the normal case, and where it has any effect most likely it will shift the result from the least-unacceptable of the major parties to the most. Many European countries use varieties of proportional representation (most commonly either party list proportional or mixed member proportional), and have a parliamentary system (so that there is not a separately-elected executive administration -- there may be an elected President but they tend to be a head of state and not head of government -- whereas in the US the executive election is even more heavily tilted to support two-party dominance than the legislative system, though the legislative election system is still the more important piece of the problem.)
existencebox 1y ago
While I normally keep the political threads at arms length, this is an interesting enough game/voting-theory question that I'm honestly surprised no one has linked the fact that this is a well-studied effect, to the point that it has a specific name: Duverger's Law. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

dragonwriter 1y ago

> Both parties in America are bad, they know they cannot be replaced because of the two party system Yes, the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists know that they cannot be replaced because of the two party system. (Likewise, neither faces the threat of, if it fails to be replaced, being completely re-oriented in a political realignment.) It's not as if, currently, scholars disagree about whether the US is in its Sixth or Seventh Party system -- the two major parties are dominant, stable, and forever unchanging.

James_K 1y ago
Do you think "political parties in America never change" is a steel man interpretation of my comment? I would suggest there is material difference between my statement "the parties have little electoral incentive to change" and your interpretation "they do not change". In my view, the latter is hyperbolic but reasonable, and the former is outright true. The parties would clearly not act as they do if people had other options to vote for.